200,000 Games and Going: The Pandemic Kept Us Apart, But My WordPress Project Brought Us Together

At the start of the pandemic, I built an online version of the dominoes-based game Mexican Train so my family could keep playing while staying safe. 200,000 games later, it has become my most successful “startup” to date, despite doing no marketing and being donation-based. It has also helped tens of thousands of people feel less isolated during the pandemic and after. I will walk through the surprising journey of starting a project on a whim, building a game on WordPress, how a community emerged, and the lessons I learned along the way.